Vil and I stared at the woman, and the woman stared back.

It was a picturesque moment, I should say. The table was a living chiaroscuro painting, her pointed champaign glass still fizzing, still frozen in its aim, and the hostage, completely still, possibly dead, all lit by the sharp overheard light at the warehouse's ceiling. The dust here wisped and floated in it, almost its own living mass, and when the door shut and locked behind us, small eddies swirled about.

"Well?" the woman said. "Why not join me? I've even brought you dinner." Sure enough, several plates of food sat at the table with accompanying silverware and shiny plate covers.

Obviously, this entire game was stupid. We had come here for Johnny, and we would leave with Johnny. Hot girl or not.

Hmmm-click.

+1 Handgun (Common)

Before I could reach for it, Vil stepped forward. "Is that Johnny?"

"It is," she said.

"Is he alive?"

"He is," she said.

Vil gestured with an open palm at me.

Hmmm-click.

+1 Longsword (Rare)

I reached into my slot, took the longsword, and handed it to Vil.

The woman raised a pistol at Johnny's head. She clicked the hammer back and hit us with a patient smile. "Sit," she ordered.

I glanced at Vil, and he at me, and he nodded. Vil rammed the longsword in the dirt, and together, we approached the table.

The smile never left her.

I pulled out the rickety wooden chair and sat directly across from the woman. Vil sat on my right. Johnny was sitting on my left. When my chair creaked beneath me, Johnny moaned--he moaned?--he moaned! He was alive!

Now we just had to figure out how to get rid of this dumbass woman.

"Go on," she said with a gesture. "Your dinner may be a bit cold, but please. Eat."

Vil stared hard, but when the woman--using her free hand--neatly removed the metal plate cover from his dish, it presented to him a fine meal. Steak with a perfect sear accompanied with some assorted vegetables. It looked... actually really good.

I didn't wait for her. I removed my own damn plate cover, and when I saw what I was offered, I dropped the metal cover into the dirt beside me. It clanged with an echo, and I stared down into this... food.

It was a plate of trash. No, really. Garbage. Some old candy wrappers, empty aluminum cans, I think I saw a--yeah, definitely--a moldy sandwich (half-eaten), shards of glass peppered in like bacon bits, an oily substance drizzled across--tar, probably (it smelled like tar), and on its own plate beside it, I assumed was dessert. Which was dirt. Real gourmet dirt, too, not the bootleg stuff. It was like a mix of clay and soft beach sand, mixed to a consistency of ice cream.

I'm not gonna lie. At this point in my life, I had developed a taste for such things--trash, mostly--and I was nearly salivating at the sight of it.

But how did she know?

Vil's plate clinked as he worked into his steak. He already had a bib over his chest and meat stains on his mouth.

I picked up the fork and knife like a gentleman and started to cut through my dinner. "Who are you?" I asked.

"The foreign noble," she answered.

I stabbed one of the aluminum cans with a fork and pushed it into my mouth. It chewed it, then swallowed. It scraped and rattled on its way down into my trash can belly. "Okay, then, foreign noble. You set that bounty, right?"

She nodded, her smile never leaving.

"Then why all this? Was this all just a big set up?"

She huffed a small laugh and said, "Not exactly. It was supposed to be much more grand, but this idiot"--she stomped on Johnny's foot, and he yelped--"messed everything up."

"You wanted him to kill you? Isn't that just suicide but more complicated?"

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"He was bait," she said. "The mob was useless, so I had to handle everything myself."

"The mob was in on it," I said.

"No, the government was in on it," she said back. "I had to call in a favor with the royal family. Tit for tat. Sexual favors here, political intrigue there. That sort of thing," she winked.

I set my fork and knife down on either side of my plate. "But why?" I asked. "All this just to have dinner with Vil and me?"

She jolted to her feet, knocking her chair back, and she gripped my fork, shanked the moldy sandwich, and stabbed it into my mouth. All while her pistol was still leveled at Johnny's face. "Chew," she ordered.

I swallowed. I had been avoiding that fuckin' old sandwich since I didn't like expired food. Not because of the taste, but I didn't care much for the texture.

Satisfied, she eased back into her seat. "Because," she said. "We've met. Don't you remember?"

"Nope."

"It all started back in Lambston," she said in a dreamy tone, almost as if remembering fondly.

As she spoke, my mind raced and raced to figure out how in the hell I could have known her. I had probably slept with countless beautiful women in my multi-century lifetime, so it was impossible to tell. There wasn't even a point in trying to think about it.

Instead, I thought about the here and now. About the bounty and about Johnny and the woman and Vil and my current objective. To meet up with the rebels again, to find and protect Jenna, to continue on my quest to kill Marianna the Harlot Queen, and to finally, maybe, get my body back. But this stupid, sexy bitch was in my way.

I just needed Johnny. I needed to get him out of here. But how?

The woman continued. "I was but a young thing in the streets of that bustling city, fresh into this world, bright-eyed and hopeful as all young things were."

I glanced over at Vil. He continued to chew on his steak, paying almost no attention to the situation. What a fool. I couldn't rely on him. I needed to handle this myself.

That was it. The woman was distracted telling the story, and Vil was still eating. I could just snatch Johnny and run.

The woman slammed her fist on the table. Plates and silverware rattled. Johnny moaned. "And then you FUCKING stabbed me!" She grasped at her heart with all the drama she could muster. "You goddamn stabbed me! For no reason!"

I blinked. I was easily 40% sure this never happened, but I had also killed a lot of people, so it was vaguely possible. Maybe she was wearing knight's armor at the time. Maybe she was disguised as a rogue or even a man. Maybe she was just batshit desperate and channeled her crush on me into some kind of desperate, violent kind of love.

The woman continued to rant, to bitch at me about this or that, but honestly, I stopped listening. I had to figure out how to escape from this so that I win. With any kind of hostage situation, I needed a strategy.

I could make an anti-creeper bomb and douse the area in a cloud of sleep-inducing smoke, but that would affect Vil, too. I couldn't carry both Vil and Johnny, so I'd need to leave Vil behind. Would I be willing to use up that card here?

Instead, I could time my attack on the woman just when her pistol is off-target from Johnny's face. If I could grapple with her, Vil could use the moment to kill her. Easy.

But.

If Vil instead tried to take Johnny for himself, leaving me all tied up with this clingy slut, then I would lose everything. I'd be left behind without Johnny, without money to get anywhere, and without Vil, my bait.

The woman slammed her fist on the table again. Stuff rattled. Johnny moaned. In her fist, a familiar knife--no--it was a recycler arm! Like she just ripped it out of a local trash can, but it... glowed blue? It was enchanted! An enchanted knife-hand!

"Don't you remember, Redrim?" she said with wild eyes. She propped her knee on the table, and she started to crawl over it. Her hand still held the pistol to Johnny's face, and her other gripped the knife. "Don't you remember how you stabbed that innocent little recycler on that quiet morning?"

She was... no. She was a recycler! No, the recycler that I killed way back in Lambston, the one I took the recycler core out of, the one whose guts spilled out into the sidewalk and attracted all the crows. It was her!

Hmmm-click-click.

+1 Anti-Creeper Explosive

+1 Umbilical Fuse >> Anti-Creeper Explosive

I leaned back. Further. I needed her just close enough that she could--

Tink.

Her knife pressed against my chest, but I felt... vibrations. It vibrated! And soon--sparks. It was cutting through me!

Vil jolted to his feet. His chair toppled over.

The woman pounced further on me.

I detonated the bomb.

An explosion of smoke shot out all through my cracks, my mouth, my eye holes, soon blanketing the area in thick smoke--

Right as Vil had cast the spell.

Arcs of electricity snapped and popped through the cloud, somehow electrifying it, shocking both the woman and me so hard our limbs stiffened, and I screamed from the pain.

And somehow, I heard Vil shout and curse nearby. The smoke must’ve carried his own spell back to him.

The spell clicked off. The woman flipped off me and vanished in the smoke. Small sparks of lightning still buzzed through the thick blackness of the spell, but--why didn't it work? She should've knocked out cold. Maybe the shock of lightning counteracted it.

It didn't matter. I needed to get Johnny as soon as possible.

I dug my hands around in the smoke, finding the edge of the table, gliding along its side, and--

I found him. I found Johnny. But on the other side was Vil, gripping his other arm.

"What the hell was that?" Vil said through his teeth. "You fucked everything up."

"It would've worked," I snapped back. "But you had to do some crazy cowboy shit."

"Worked?" He glared. "You tried to put me to sleep."

"And you waited until her knife was against my chest to zap us both with lightning."

He grunted away the accusation. "Forget it. We just need to take Johnny, and--"

A piercing laugh hit us from the other side of the warehouse.

A burst of wind shot out from Vil, dissipating the smoke. The woman wasn't near. She was on the far end, in the pitch-black darkness.

"I never told you my name," she said.

An unearthly grumble resonated through the ground. The plates rattled. Silverware shook off the table. I had heard this sound before.

It rumbled closer. Something heavy. A machine. A big one.

She spoke through a loudspeaker. "I am Barnabas Jessie. Level 10 Bounty Hunter. Level 29 Mage. Level 72 Machinist. And a level 99 Tank Commander."

It pulled in beneath the overhead light, the veil of darkness slipping off, and there it was.

The enemy tank.